Imagine working this hard to track down people sharing ideas, that you didn't work to produce or fund in the first place, in order to punish them for not giving you a financial cut... Companies like this are just holding humanity back.
It's not actually hard, but I agree with the point. BTW, they also charge authors ridiculous amount of money for additional services, e.g. printing colored images.
In a far (and optimistic) future such companies will be studied as examples of social parasites in schools and universities.
I think they'll be studied as universal basic income. There's so many college graduates with no skills who basically unemployable, but are still collecting a decent salary to teach things that no one wants to pay for in the first place. Our economy can evidently support a lot of people who aren't working.
The companies themselves aren't the problem, they are a symptom. The real problem is governments, especially the US government, that happily use their monopoly on the use of force to help such companies enforce such business models.
So is your point that companies are put in a position where they _have_ to take advantage of government's use of force?
Elsevier could well come up with a business model that isn't purely based on extraction, rent-seeking and legal intimidation, but the problem is that governments possess legal resources that have good-faith use cases?
Yes, the problem is that governments allow such business models. These legal resources are used overwhelmingly with bad faith and to the detriment of the society, so maybe they need to be reformed.
To be clear, I 100% agree regulation and more commonsensical legislation is fundamental to stop and punish bad players like Elsevier. I just find it gross that consolidated players invariably go their way.
Imagine working this hard to write a book. Some authors work for years. Many work for at least a year. Some academics work several years on one article.
Elsevier is very much a partner to producing and funding this work. The people who work there edit, format and distribute the work. The authors are very much partners in this endeavor and they're often paid royalties by Elsevier.
And then scummy people rationalize their piracy with lots of different stilted rationales.
If you see a poor author, you can be sure the piracy is cutting into the ability to support themselves by selling their writing. But, yeah, imagine that it's Elsevier that's holding humanity back, not pirate scum.
Believe me, the publisher still hasn't to reconcile the work and tweak it when it comes in. Have you ever tried to edit a book from N authors? Even if they're using the exact same style file, there are always issues.
But again, go start your own free journal. People have been trying it since the Internet began and the best we get are some glorfied FTP server. Yes, this is all that some branches of science need, but there's a reason why Elsevier is still in business.
elsevier isn’t paying authors a dime lmao, the authors are the ones paying here.
A publisher would never deign to pay an academic. They get “paid in exposure”, and again, actually they have to pay for that exposure in the first place. Elsevier sits in the middle and skims the authors when they publish and the readers when they read. Peer reviewers, of course, work for free. Nice work if you can get it - billions of dollars a year for running a static website and providing a latex template. You could run the whole thing off a single server and cloudflare with some http basic auth lol.
(and if you’re asking “why don’t you start your own journal then”… that’s why arxiv and others are taking off like crazy over the past 15 years.)
Elsevier pays many authors. They may not pay the authors of some of the journal articles, but they also publish many books which generate royalties that are shared with the authors.
But why does pay have anything to do with this? Why does it justify the piracy? No one is holding a gun to the head of the journal article authors. They're making their own choice to submit it. And why? Probably because they want the fame and hope that it will generate big grants in the future. The editors, typesetters etc at Elsevier have ZERO chance of getting one of those grants.
And you mentioned the other academics who review papers. Again, they're doing it of their own free will. And why? Because they want to stay on the cutting edge. They want a chance to read the papers before they're published. Why? I would think that getting their own big grants is a motivator for many of them. Maybe all of them.
I'm glad that Arxiv is taking off. But riddle me this: why does Elsevier still exist? Why are enough scientists submitting their papers? Because they're making a rational decision about the benefits. They don't want to spend weeks fussing with LaTeX. They don't want to maintain archives. Everyone in this chain is a free person making a free decision.
If you don't like it, don't read the papers. Or complain to the authors who chose Elsevier.
No, they're doing it because their career is tied to it. No published papers, reviews, editorships, means you're not going to land that academic job, you're not going to move up the ladder to full professor and you're not going to have grants (which some places tie salary to!).
Elsevier exists because of inertia. There's so much inertia left over from when paper journals kind of mattered that it's hard to change at an individual level.
Publishing with Elsevier doesn't avoid LaTeX either. Some journals mandate you use their template and you still have to proof after acceptance and correct all the mistakes the typesetting staff makes.
So in the scientists' case it's a "career", but in Elsevier's case it's money and greed? Are those scientists being paid? If so, I would submit that it's just as much about money and greed for them too.
BTW many of the scientists are better paid than the editors and proofreaders in academic publishing. But, hey, this thread is all about hating on Elsevier so what am I saying?
Funny how when Elsevier tries to enforce its copyright, HN acts like they're the devil, but when the AI training data is the subject turns into the strictest IP rights warriors I have ever seen.
They get papers for free, that were funded by the public, or other entities. Then they charge people obscene amount of money to let them download the PDF.
This is dictionary definition of "parasite".
Nobody funds most artists. Buying artwork isn't funding. They produce art from their own funding. Then a company leeches them off and trains models without compensating them.
I am okay at training models on arXiv papers. The authors consented to spread the knowledge publicly.
With such dumb-logic comments, you make it hard to take your point-of-view seriously.
Edit: The copyright of the paper _authors_ isn't being protected. They are being blood-sucked. And, before the Hub, if you emailed an author for a free PDF, if you couldn't afford it, most, if not all emailed you a free PDF.
Harvard famously said that they couldn't afford Elsevier anymore. [0]
I send my research to Elsevier for free, and surrender all my publishing rights & copyright to Elsevier to be able to publish it.
When/if it's published, I have a paltry "author's copy" in return, which I have to be very diligent while giving copies of it away, otherwise Elsevier might punish me.
At the end, it's a paper which bears my name, but I have none of the rights attached to it, and Elsevier gets literally millions of dollars from each country which licenses its publications.
Their expenses are a mere rounding error for what they charge, and they are doing this to protect their income, not my research.
Copyright infringement / ethical issues in AI is something else:
Crawlers reap & providers sell my data without my consent, and I get nothing in return, except the ability to poorly imitate my writing/art style, making my work, blood, sweat and tears I shed over these years to create that style worthless.
Both parties earn exorbitant amount of money with my work, for free, and suck me dry in the process. One at least gives me a paltry PDF file and maybe some recognition, and the other one threatens my livelihood while raising hype and applauding degeneration of human achievement and reducing it to a mere set of numbers.
Both are cutting the tree they're living on, though.
I am not familiar with the academic publishing world but it seems this should be disruptable. Why isn't there some other outfit running a WordPress site taking submissions and publishing them on much less onerous terms?
It's kind of like saying; 'Shit, why are people paying 6 figures for college degrees in US when they could just learn most of that for free'.
Because no one gives a shit if you don't have the expensive piece of parchment.
Academic publishing is similar. The impact factor and 'prestige' of the journal matters to your University, your peers, your grants panel, and yourself. However this results in 2 scenarios, when you publish in a top tier journal, a) the journal charges you a small fee and also pay-walls your work so your reach is lessened, then actively polices you sharing YOUR work without permission b) the journal charges an exorbitant fee (Nature wants $11,000 USD) for open-access publishing that allows wider distribution (but still has stipulations in some cases).
HOWEVER, some editorial boards of big for-profit journals have flipped the table and started their own not-for-profit journals with blackjack and hookers. The big one in my field was NeuroImage board creating Imaging Neuroscience - with a public letter to the owners (Elsevier if I'm not mistaken) calling out the bullshit publishing fees.
There is a reason no one gives a shit. And it has nothing to do with publishers. If a paper actually contributed meaningfully to a field it everyone would know about it.
Ironically, institutions like Elsevier justify the existence of the numerous hack academics (not scientists) that exist nowadays. Most of whom have no leg to stand on complaining about Elsevier's rent seeking when they themselves would be infinitely more useful flipping burgers.
This is already disrupted in AI at the highest stages. arXiv paper are the first class citizens there; people regularly cite blog posts, and even tweets in their papers. Rather than journals, people take conferences more seriously.
Now, some companies like DeepMind like to publish in Nature for prestige's sake. That's a different thing.
The disruption started even before the AI hype. ArXiV is not an AI focused service anyway (it started with pysics IIRC). It's FAIR and Open science and push from countries like Germany which forced Elsevier to sign open access submission and publication agreements in the first place.
This happened ~5 years before AI hype became something, and ArXiV was a force even before that.
Uh-- no one is forcing you to send anything to Elsevier. Or any other publisher.
If you don't like the terms, self-publish. The Internet makes it easier than ever.
The reason so many people use Elsevier is because they realize it's a better deal than self-publishing.
Copyright is a right that's given to YOU, the creator. If you don't want to sign it away, find your own way to distribute your work. Copyright will protect YOU from big companies stealing your hard work.
The name of the game is Peer Review, which is a fundamental pillar of science. Your blog or self-published papers are not peer reviewed.
If you found and can sustain an open access journal with a reputable peer review process, you can do a lot of business. If you're not get subverted by big houses, of course.
It's not the AI research which disrupts old publishing houses. It's FAIR and Open Science.
The biggest reason publishing houses still continue is not that they hold PDFs, but they provide peer reviews as a service. It's what it provides their prestige and inertia.
The bad thing is many open access journals keep the bar pretty low, allowing Elsevier, Springer, et. al to amplify their power. Moreover, if you are not aware, every big publishing house loves to allow ArXiV submissions even in intermediate revisions because they reduce the editorial load on themselves while raising the quality bar.
You can already cite blog posts, etc. in your publications. It's not something frown upon as long as what you cite is sound.
At the end of the day, FAIR & Open research, institutional federated and peer reviewed data warehouses and (high quality) open access publications will kill these big houses, and they already bent pretty hard with forced open access subscriptions and submission agreements done by countries.
Disclaimer: My institution also manages these subscriptions for universities country-wide.
it's not funny when you compare "profits over other's knowledge" to "share knowledge without profits", it doesn't make sense at all. potatoes and oranges
As I understand, it is not Elsevier's fault, it is the government that allocates funding and gives promotion based on number of publications made in Elsevier journals.
Some of those governments, in Europe, are also starting to mandate open access though.
In practice, for maths papers I look on arXiv, for crypto papers on iacr and so on - academics generally want their work to be read (and cited) so they're usually happy to make it available for free. There's even tricks you can play like uploading an "author version" or "preprint" if you're forced to use a commercial publisher for a conference.
If you're funded by a Horizon/EU grant, you can cost the article publication charges into your grant application in most cases. It ends up being the funder, not the author, who pays.
That also means that if the whole racket is revisited at some point, then Elsevier will get to pick on someone their own size if not bigger - and will hopefully come off worse in that fight.
Is that the best use of grant funds though really? Yes, it's not the author directly out of pocket but that money could be used towards new equipment, boosting grad student/post-doc pay, etc.
One can publish on Zenodo, universities and authors can band together and split the difference: divide the cost of hosting and / or optionally paid peer review.
I know, what I'm saying is if universities band together, they can arrange for reviewers to be paid, so that authors at all universities start a discussion when they are assigned to review for Elsevier... for free.
Sadly the publication metric is sick and made the overwhelming majority of published scientific papers, I am sadly a co-author of a paper that I know for a fact can't be reproduced because the underlying data has been stressed enough to show what the main writer wanted to show.
And it's not even the authors fault the system is like that. Research isn't just about saying "hey we found this works", but also about "we wasted 3 years, it doesn't work sadly". Yet, the second option does not lead to the same impact, because if something doesn't work it's not going to be reproduced and thus quoted.
Proof that it does not work is still an interesting result! However, I think you meant to say that if you failed to show that it works, it often also means you cannot proof that it doesn't work. And then you indeed have nothing worth publishing.
Say you're researching some material to have some behaviour. It doesn't have it.
You're not gonna be published on high impact journals with data that doesn't move the field, even though as you point out the information is as valuable.
it could be quoted by say medical insurance companies, or by patent offices, but that would mean a wider quotation scope.
a less extreme widening of scope would be just the research funds that apply or deny grants for research: suppose a flurry of papers investigates the superconductive behavior of a piece of meteorite, and you're the one to kill the buzz with your negative result, then future grant denials could cite your boring negative result.
It sounds like it's good practice to get two copies of a document from two different sources, and to compare their hashes before publishing them. You can embed data in anything, so this would include images, audio files, PDF files, or programs. At least for Elsevier it's pretty obvious they're using a key to track you.
A FOSS tool used for .pdf files cleaning from potential malware, which also can delete metadata, is DangerZone. Probably overkill for simple metadata cleaning, but worth mentioning nonetheless.
It can be not just metadata. There are plenty of ways to hide 128 bits of ID in a long enough pdf. White rectangles on white background, slightly non-black coloured pixels here and there, you name it. Many can even survive a print-and-scan.
In theory turning everything into an image then compressing using lossy formats aiming at very low size should mask subtle visual artifacts, but yeah, steganography could be implemented in many other ways, such as slightly different fonts (sizes, line spacing, orientation, etc). I wonder if AI, could be used to analyze and find those details by comparing potentially watermarked identical documents.
that's is. After if needed we can add extra metadata. It's not specially designed to remove certain kind of tracking but simple and useful enough in most cases.
0. Disable saving the zone identifier - or clear it with a tool. This information is most likely preserved when copying a file, and depending on the tool and format, it might get into a compressed archive to be restored later.
There's a Total Commander plugin which can show where a given file was downloaded from. Not sure which one it is as I have multiple installed. Probably this one: https://totalcmd.net/plugring/ntfsstreamviewer.html
1. Download PDF from publisher.
2. Open it in your PDF viewer.
3. Press print.
4. Physically print the document.
5. Re-scan the printed PDF pages.
--->6. Run OCR to rebuild the document
7. profit!
Wouldn't help if marks are visible, e.g. some regular string "copy №1234" somewhere or something more complicated like uneven spacing between lines or words
david@desktop:~/test$ ls -hl
total 8.9M
-rw-r--r--. 1 david david 2.2M Jun 10 06:02 chromium.pdf
-rw-r--r--. 1 david david 4.4M Jun 10 06:02 firefox.pdf
-rw-r--r--. 1 david david 2.3M Jun 10 06:01 input.pdf
david@desktop:~/test$
On Firefox if you print you can choose "safe to pdf" then it has a different checksum (compared to the downloaded one), if you say "print using the system dialog" then "print to file" the checksum is again different (compared to the other two).
It annoys me how you have to manually choose these safe options in FF. Same with "copy link" vs "copy link without site tracking." Why would anybody ever want the former?
Site tracking might end up being needed if a site changes how their URLs work in response, breaking sites. Facebook made a change a while back where they went from fb.com/<unique readable url>+<tracking slug> to fb.com/<link UUID> after the tracking details were getting stripped out.
From the pdf-redact-tools page: "Warning: This project is no longer maintained. A much better tool is dangerzone." (A link to dangerzone can be found in the originally submitted Mastodon thread.)
The fact that elsevier and other similar entities ar allowed to continue to exist, i.e. that people are actually willing to give these parasites money needs to be analyzed so a root cause can be found and the dreaded thing can be put to pasture for good.
Leads:
- academics are ultimately lazy and do not care to fix the system
- academics are so self-engrossed with their research that, like much of what they do that isn't directly pertaining to their work, the quality of what they do is horrible.
- there exist a system of incentives that feed something back to people helping perpetuate such a parasitic system.
It’s a mix depending on discipline. A lot of tech for example has moved to OA journals and those work just fine for researcher advancement. But displacing Nature just isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future when things like tenure ride on publishing there.
Metadata is very low hanging fruit for document watermarking.
Typically the PDF renderer will use spacing, kerning, invisible
characters, and all sorts of steganography to make each copy unique.
What would be the point of a hash? More likely the hash is a MAC,
that's been salted with some secret plus the unique copy. That would
help the publisher identify a laundered copy. With two or more copies
its possible to re-anonymise. That's actually something I wonder
whether summarising language models would be good at. Of course they
may also make steganographic alterations to diagrams.
Because PDFs are such dirty documents I almost always convert them to
plain text, usually with no loss of semantics.
They modify it all the time by providing different access formats and with editors. But it does not change the meaning. Whitespaces do not alter the meaning.
You should see what ISO and ANSI do when you try to get a PDF of one of their standards. PDF with DRM, installing a DRM application on your computer that some claim cannot be uninstalled from your machine. You are also allowed to keep only a SINGLE copy of the PDF and only a single printout. It's just crazy.
Maybe a quick website that allowed folks to upload a PDF and get back an anonymous PDF would be great. That way folks don't have to be proficient in command line!
I wrote docleaner (https://github.com/TUD-CERT/docleaner) for a very similar purpose, specifically to remove unintended PII from PDFs that are created from e.g. Word. I don't host it anywhere publicly, though.
How would one design a general tool for that…? If multiple publishers uses their own proprietary methods for embedding hidden digital watermarks in the PDF, it might not be so easy to detect them all.
A noob question. Do we need to so many steps or can the hash be simple removed by printing the pdf to another pdf and sharibg the printed pdf? Granted the quality might suffer and size might increase, but if that works that looks like a simple option.
If that doesn't work, any way to integrate all these steps and make it possible through pandoc?
Whatever method they choose, you can just diff a couple of PDFs to figure out what they did, and then write some code to detect and revert or mask that.
Yet another way to weaponize their paywall on knowledge and continued existence as nothing more than a greedy middle-man. Sad that more organizations and academics refuse to buck the system and continue to support Elsever as a gatekeeper.
Hopefully zlib and other public knowledge repositories will add to their upload process a stripper for this PDF metadata automatically.
Sci-hub is so good. I’m a professional robotics engineer working on open source robotics funded by philanthropy. I don’t have extra money to pay extortion fees to information brokers. That’s a wild concept when the internet serves data effectively for free and all I want to do is help people all over the world grow organic vegetables with automation.
Sci-hub gives me access to research done by other people like me who want other people to see their work. I stand on the shoulders of giants.
We absolutely must dismantle the systems that keep human beings from valuable knowledge. Our future depends on it.
Sci hub is so good. Im a university partner and have accesses to a top research uni's library. I use Sci hun because logging into Elsevier is a massive PIA.
It's been under massive legal attack in a few jurisdictions, and as far as I know, has stopped scraping.
Many, many papers from after 2021 that are not available. It has become a major issue, cutting me off at times from new results important to my work or study.
It's kind of a scary time now, and I feel the strong need to regroup and find a way to get sci-hub back to scraping.
We have to imagine there are millions of people being cut off from millions of people-years of research for every year this embargo continues. It's crucial that we bring it back up!
Anyhow, thanks for being a sci-hub user and endorser! I love it when my peers in academia use it!
That reminds me I've been meaning to offer a contribution to your farming robot!
For ease of interoperability, I'd like to build a one way automation that occasionally exports your OnShape design into your GitHub. That makes it easy for users to throw parts into a CAM editor or slicer, without having any on-shape experience.
Have you thought about the automation, and would you like to discuss your concerns, needs, and like-to-haves?
Hi this sounds great! I would like some kind of YAML that would let me decide how different pieces would be exported. Also note that soon I will be doing massive clean up in the onshape repo as it is a huge mess, and we are moving towards release.
Please email me at my email in my profile. Would love to discuss further. Thank you!
Elsevier is not to blame, this is fair business. It is like you were blaming homeopathy companies for selling overpriced sugar and chalk.
The blame is on Academia who decided that they will be based on paying a company to send them knowledge, paying a company to get knowledge from them, providing them competent people for free and making their decisions dependent on all of this.
This is whining about their pain when whipping themselves at the same time.
This system was put in place in ancient times and changed in the meantime, the first interested somehow did not notice that.
Note: I used to be in Academia and left after my PhD, among others because of these practices and medieval organizations. I loved the time I spent with brilliant people and the hours of teaching.
> It is like you were blaming homeopathy companies for selling overpriced sugar and chalk.[1]
Yes, I do. Because they make claims that stay just this side of the line of active deception[2] about the benefits of the products they produce, benefits they know are non-existent.
[1] Sugar and chalk might have more effect on the body than many homeopathic remedies. Most are structurally 'distilled water', according to studies with gas chromatography.
[2] and have, many times, actively crossed that line into outright deception.
re [1]: you are right - they are the holders of the active substance (which is non-existent) so their effects are going to be the only ones. There are more such substances, starting with water.
re [2]: would you have some examples? For the record, I hate homeopathy with all my soul and actively fought it for years because of their unscientific claims. There were claims that were UFO-like (quantum field effects on substance energy - pick your own random words) or backed by idiots who made a science out of it (starting with Nature which published Bonaventure's idiocies and shown that they are a crappy journal like some many others). But I do not have anything handy that would show deception (as in lying)
